T.V.F. Brogan, S. J. Kahn, "Didactic poetry", in: The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, 4th edition, Princeton 2012, 361-364.
I. CONCEPT AND HISTORY. Didaktikos in Gr. relates to teaching, and implies its counterpart: learning. "All men by nature desire knowledge" and all experience (embodied in lang., says Croce); hence all lit. (in the broadest sense) can be seen as "instructive." Given such interacting complexities, our problem becomes one of "historical semantics" (Spitzer): of modulations and transformations (Fowler) of the d. concept, and of attempts to distinguish it from near neighbors such as allegory, archetype, myth, symbol, fable, and satire (qq.v.). The category of unconscious or unintended teaching could lead us astray into infinite mists and abysses. (What do we learn from "Jabberwocky?" That "nonsense" q.v. can make an attractive poem.) Aware of such proliferating contexts, we try to focus here chiefly (but not exclusively) on poetry which clearly intends "useful teaching," embodying Horace's "instruction and delight" in the genre of "d. poems." Basic categories relate to the contents ("themes"--q.v.) of poems, inseparable from their forms. In De vulgari eloquentia, Dante specified the worthiest objects as Safety, Love, and Virtue--his corresponding poetic themes being War, Love, and Salvation (or Morality: "direction of the will"). To these we add knowledge (Science and Philosophy), Beauty (Aesthetics), Efficiency (e.g. "How to" run a farm or write a poem), and Information ("Thirty days hath September"). Modern discussions have tended to emphasize the problematics of Knowledge and Morality. Beardsley treated "the D. Theory of lit." as seeing "a close connection between truth and value" (426-32). He mentions De rerum natura, but no one reads Lucretius' poem today for information on materialism and atomic theory; Beardsley wants rather to clarify the relations among "predications," cognition, and how readers submit poems to experiential "testing"--with reference to "philosophical, economic, social, or religious" doctrines. Arnold Isenberg confronted the "strong case" of "the d. poem or essay" in an intricate analysis (265-81). Another necessary preliminary is Fowler's concept of "mode," illuminating the continuing life of genres. Fowler writes: "modal terms never imply a complete external form" and "tend to be adjectival"--as in "d. essay" or "d. lyric." He finds it remarkable that "several important literary kinds, notably georgic, essay, and novel, are not supposed to have corresponding modes. Can it be that these modal options have never been taken up? By no means" (108). Once we accept modal extensions of didacticism, its presence and power throughout the hist. of poetry become obvious. II. ANTIQUITY. A product of lang. and hist., poetry also transcends these via archetypes and translations; and d. modes probably preceded the invention of alphabets and writing. Indeed, for oral trads. (religious and secular) rhythm and metaphor have probably always been used to aid memory and enliven ritual; such speculations about prehistoric poetry seem to be confirmed by surviving fragments and modern anthropology. Religious scriptures in all langs. tend to be "poetic," mingling freely epic hist. (narrative), hymn and psalm (qq.v.), and prophetic vision and preaching. In the Judeo-Christian Bible, for example, there are elements of poetic drama, philosophy, practical wisdom (proverbs, q.v.), and parable--in d. modes. It was the Greeks who first, in Europe, distinguished clearly between poetry of imitation (Homer) and versified science (e.g. the lost poem by Empedocles); within mimetic uses of melodious lang., between "manners" of narration and drama; and within the latter, analyzed the tragic catharsis (q.v.; Aristotle)--with comedy, epic, and other "kinds" in the background. Plato notoriously banished the poets from his ideal Republic because they taught lies about the gods, and aroused and confused men's passions. Two main tendencies of the d. in verse were created by Hesiod (8th c. B.C.): in Theogony, knowledge about the gods, their origins and stories, problems of culture--moving towards philosophic abstractions; and in Works and Days, "how to" farm and the like--towards practical and specific information. Each kind (details are fragmentary) leaned towards a different style and meter (e.g. Aratus' "Phainomena" used hexameters); and in later Alexandria, the latter emphasis (erudition, technical information) became popular (e.g. Nicander of Colophon). The Romans derived from the Greeks not only gods and ideas but most of their poetic genres (translating and adapting Empedocles and Aratus, for example). Four major Lat. poets wrote masterpieces which transformed d. poetry creatively: (a) Lucretius' De rerum natura became the prototypical "philosophic" poem (Santayana) in the Empedocles and Theogony line, invoking the values of sense-experience and materialistic metaphysics. (b) Virgil's Georgics, derived from Hesiod, became the popular "how to" poem: running a farm, living with the seasons, keeping bees, and so forth (see GEORGIC). © Horace, on his Sabine farm, not only wrote memorable odes, satires, and epistles, but also wrote letters of practical advice to poets (Epistulae ad Pisones, i.e. the Ars poetica), some of his ideas and phrases becoming proverbial: e.g. "the labor of the file," "in the midst of things," "from the egg," and "make Greece your model." Finally, (d) Ovid's versified advice related chiefly to "sex and society" (Ars amatoria), a Lat. primer in matters of love. Manilius wrote a five-book poem on astrology (ed. A. E. Housman); and there were others. In sum, Lat. poets gave priority to instructing citizens and artists in a variety of subjects. Satire developed beyond light-hearted Horace to bitter Juvenal ("The Vanity of Human Wishes"). And in Asia, esp., poetry was central to Confucian teaching. Hindu philosophy is embodied in Vedic hymns (with the Upanisads); Buddhism, in epic poems (Mahabharata and Ramayana); and Persian "teaching" is embodied for Westerners in Omar Khayyam's Rubáiyát (quatrains) and the Avesta of Zoroaster. The bible of Islam, the Quran, is quintessential Ar. poetry. III. MEDIEVAL, RENAISSANCE, AUGUSTAN. Christian lit. in Europe (indeed, all religious poetry) was almost entirely d. Even in mimetic (narrative and dramatic) modes, its central purpose was to impart religious doctrines and values (see Curtius, ch. 3 and passim). For example, Martianus Capella, On the Marriage of Mercury and Philology(Menippean satire), Le Roman de la rose, and Spenser's Faerie Queene (allegory), Dante, Chaucer--d. elements are everywhere. Vagabond scholars mixed orthodox doctrine and symbols with irreverent satire and "pagan" feeling (see GOLIARDIC VERSE). Med. lit. is dense with rhymed chronicles, encyclopedias, devotional manuals and saints' lives, popularized excerpts from church doctrine, and collections of aphorisms. Early modes of theater in western Europe--mysteries and moralities (see MORALITY PLAY), Passion plays (q.v.)--aimed to combine indoctrination with celebration and entertainment. This is also true of the late masque (q.v.), where the allegorical teaching is increasingly subordinated to spectacle and dance. Milton's Comus (1634), for example, ends with a moral: "Love Virtue." The emerging Ren. and Reformation saw Lat. poetry enriched by the vernacular langs. In Ger., for example, d. works incl. Luther's Bible,Bescheidenheit by "Freidank" (1215-16), Der Renner by Hugo von Trimberg (ca. 1300), Narrenschiff by Sebastian Brant (1494), Narrensbeschwörungand Gauchmatt by Thomas Murner (1512-14). In Sp., such authors as Francisco Pacheco, Lopé de Vega, and Cervantes in Don Quixote and elsewhere wrote didactically at times. In It., literary theory flourished, reaffirming Cl. ideals and finding Virgil a "better teacher" than Cato (but Fracastoro wrote that "Teaching is in a measure the concern of the poet, but not in his peculiar capacity" emphases added). Such satires as those of Parini and Ariosto mingled d. elements with satire and autobiography; and the Georgics were imitated. In France, Rabelais and Montaigne virtually created a lit. which excelled in raison as well as esprit; masterpieces by Racine and Molière shaped the nation's emerging trad. and education; Diderot preferred the Georgics to Virgil's other poetry; A. Chenier's enthusiasm for "modern" science parallels that of Goethe and the Eng. romantics; and Jacques de Lille translated Virgil and wrote Les Jardins. But the d. line (and problem) was most clearly developed, perhaps, in England, as in Sir Philip Sidney's Defense of Poesie (1583, passim--but, despite Plato, the poet is for Sidney not a liar: "he nothing affirms and therefore never lieth"). Milton's great epic attempt was "to justify the ways of God to man"; and only in England did the Puritans close the theaters and behead a king in order to establish a Godly commonwealth. Though "engaged" tendencies in verse developed esp. in England and France, they were evident throughout much of Europe. Notoriously, the Restoration in England (one of whose classics is Dryden's Virgil) and the Neoclassic century which followed was a long period of transitions leading to romanticism (q.v.). Dryden wrote political, historical, satiric, religious, and theological poems, and translated all four of the great Lat. d. poets; Pope wrote An Essay on Crit. (1711) and other imitations of Horace, philosophic and "Moral" essays in verse, and The Dunciad (1742-43)--a d. and mock-epic-satiric masterpiece; and it is hardly necessary to insist on the didacticism of Swift and Dr. Johnson. As Chalker puts it, important poems in the georgic trad. "were often remote from any practical purpose, although others were d. in intention" (emphasis added). Not only the Lat. education of gentlemen who became poets, but the emergence of Newtonian science (see Nicolson) and The Royal Society (Cowley's poems) bore poetic fruit. New concepts of nature (q.v.) and light (optics) mingled with the descriptive paysage moralisé in complex ways, transforming georgic trad. most effectively in James Thomson's The Seasons (1730; see Cohen). We recall Dr. Johnson's distinction: the poet "does not number the streaks of the tulip." Grierson and Smith's history (1944) shows the dominance of d. and satiric modes, as well as the representative "timid revolt" of Gray in his Odes--yet few poems are more blatantly moralistic than Gray's "Elegy." The scientific (informative and theoretic) tendencies bore strange and influential fruit in Erasmus Darwin's poems (e.g. The Botanic Garden, 1791). And we recall the variety of d. elements in Crabbe, Goldsmith, and Burns: the Am. and Fr. Revolutions did make a difference. IV. 19TH AND 20TH CENTURIES. After 1800, d. aims and methods underwent radical transformations. The main shift was one from an Augustan use of Cl. and Ren. models to a growing variety of philosophies and ideologies, followed by later compromises which made "Victorian" almost synonymous with moralizing in prose and verse--as in Carlyle, Emerson, Tennyson, Ruskin, some of the pre-Raphaelites, and Arnold. Few poets are more obviously d. than Blake, for example--but his mode became one of vision and prophecy, of what we now see as "myth-making." Wordsworth and Coleridge wrestled with didacticism, esp. in odes and poems of meditation ("The Growth of a Poet's Mind"); and though Coleridge lived to regret it mildly, he did concludeThe Rime of the Ancient Mariner with a moral. In Shelley's Defense, Milton's "bold neglect of a direct moral purpose" (emphasis added) is seen as proof of that poet's genius; but neither Blake nor Shelley was unaware that to seek "to justify the ways of God to man" was to be essentially d. True, Shelley wrote in the Preface to Prometheus Unbound that "d. poetry is my abhorrence"--meaning poetry whose teaching "can be equally well expressed in prose" (I. A. Richards' "separable content"--implying superficial moralizing); but surely in Prometheus and elsewhere Shelley was, and understood himself to be, a prophet-teacher, one of the "unacknowledged legislators" of the world. Thus Wimsatt and Brooks characterize his critical position correctly as a "rhapsodic didacticism" and "a didacticism of revolution." And it was Keats who saw Shakespeare as having lived "a life of allegory," Keats who wrote that "Beauty is truth, truth beauty." One may generalize that the opposites of the Horatian pleasure-use polarity tend to meet; and that a strong anti-didacticism usually emerges in opposition to a boringly conservative culture (cf. Blackmur's "intolerable dogma"). Thus, when Poe attacked "the heresy of the D." (a position later adopted by the Fr. symbolists and others), it was because, like Shelley, he was surrounded by inept poetasters spouting clichés; and Whitman (whose didacticism has been compared to that of Blake and Wordsworth) picked up Poe's (and Emerson's) idea of working "indirectly" and symbolically. Even the fin-de-siècle proponents of art for art's sake were themselves moralists in rebellion against Arnold's "Barbarians" and "Philistines." But the older, moralizing trad. of Bryant, Longfellow, Whittier, and others in America and England had a strength of its own. In the 20th c., the best poets (e.g. Yeats, Auden) have been ardently "engaged" in various social, political, philosophical, and religious controversies. In sum, modern didacticism assumed protean forms that could no longer be forced into the genre classifications of the Augustans. We can follow this process clearly through Wellek's Hist. of Modern Crit.: thus when A. W. Schlegel discusses "the d. philosophical poem," he falls into the trap (for Wellek) of defining all poetry as "esoteric philosophy"--excusable, however, when one means, as the romantics did, "a poetic philosophy, a thinking in symbols as it was practiced by Schelling or Jakob Böhme." In this, Wellek is disparaging inferior poems "held together merely by logic." Similarly, Wellek remarks that "with the years Wordsworth's point of view became. . .more and more simply d. and instructive" (emphases added). Still, Wellek quotes Wordsworth (1808): "every great poet is a teacher: I wish either to be understood as a teacher, or as nothing." This debate about the changing nature of didacticism took a variety of shapes in England, America, and Europe. Yet what long poem in Eng. had a more clearly d. intent (i.e. interp. of hist., fate) than The Dynasts--Hardy's War and Peace? Since the substance of such teachings has become increasingly complex, fragmented, and problematic, we find the emphasis now falling on conflict, dialectics, quest, doubt, psychology, existential immediacy, and pluralism (q.v.) rather than on any fixed doctrine. For instance, in a poem such as Karl Shapiro's Essay on Rime, and in much of T. S. Eliot, in the Pound of The Cantos, and in Stevens' "meditations," we witness modal transformations of the d. Robert Frost's inveterate didacticism finds expression by transformations of Cl. eclogue and pastoral (e.g. "Build Soil," "The Lesson for Today"; see Empson; and see ECLOGUE and PASTORAL). Modern degradations of didacticism, of course, occur in the use of poetry for propaganda or even advertising. Anglo-Am. poetry is esp. rich in works with historical, regional, geographic, philosophic, and political substance. The "how to" motif is still evident when Pound writes an ABC of Reading or John Hollander a versified textbook on prosody. One thinks of such old-new genres as utopian (and dystopian) narrative and science fiction; and there is a strong d. element in modern satire (R. Campbell, A. M. Klein). A recent study by H. J. Blackham devotes a chapter to "Modern Instances" and concludes with "The Message" (cf. Scholes). One concludes that the d. mode is very much alive in modern lit. (possibly more so in prose than in verse); and that many of the traditional d. genres have undergone complex transformations and modulations. We find not only "modern georgics" (Frost, MacNeice), but epigrams (Ogden Nash), parodies without number, parables (Kafka), and other genres aiming at some sort of didacticism. Critical theory, however, has tended either to skirt the issues or to convert the d. mode into related categories. See also BEAST EPIC; BESTIARY; CRITICISM; ETHICS AND CRITICISM; EXEMPLUM; FABLIAU; GEORGIC; SPRUCHDICHTUNG. T. V. F. Brogan S. J. Kahn